Pages

Friday, 19 June 2015

8 Pages From The Heroes Rising Preview! Come Take a Look!

I've finally roughed out 8 pages of my preview. Ta da! It's been tough, but I'm happy with how it's progressing. Talk about a learning curve! I've been revising and re-revising until my eyes started to bleed. But I'm happy with the result.

So here's what happened. About a week and a half ago I had 9 pages cleaned and coloured, but something wasn't sitting right. The art style seemed to be all over the place. And the colour - hoo boy! It sucked. It was bland and inconsistant. I really suck at colour.
My solution was to look at all of Francesco Francavilla's artwork I could find on the Internet, suck it into my brain, and try my best to follow his sensibilities. Why? a) his colour rocks and b) I'm totally clueless with colour so emulating a master like Fancavilla is sort of my only option at this point.

Anyway, I finished page 9, and I realized I hated the art, and I hated how this particular scene was playing out. Soooo, I had to scrap a lot of it. Not something I like to do. But this is my first real go at a professional comic book, so I'm climbing a steep learning curve here. My drawing skills have also improved dramatically since the start of this project (not trying to toot my horn, but it's true. I haven't drawn prolifically in years, so all this drawing has worked the muscle but good.) So looking back at the early pages, I knew I could do better.

And story-wise, the scene was boring once I started drawing it out. It was a dream sequence that was suppose to reveal a bit of Jack's character, but it just fell flat. And Ms. Specter was dull and boring. So I rewrote her as a bit of a goofball. In fact I tried to add a bit more humour to the story overall. Horror and humour go hand in hand after all.

Okay, enough chit chat. Here's the pages:

One more note about the colour: Originally in Clip Studio Paint I was colouring each panel one at a time as I went, without thinking about the whole page. Big mistake. On my second pass here, I've done a rough 'colour key' on the whole page. Just one layer and I coloured everything at once. It's a rough pass but it gives me a way better idea as to what the colour is going to look like, and also makes revisions waaay easier. A particular red was giving me a lot of trouble. I kept flip flopping making it more red or more orange. What a pain! But it was easy to revise since I was just working with the simple colour key.

Hope you enjoy my pages. I still have two more to go. I've decided that for the preview I'm going to have 10 pages of art and two filler pages (the hostess ad and something else.)